were in close pursuit. Figures were running in all directions far below.

The stars were breaking out and it was night now except for the glare of the exploding rocket far to the left. Now below the forest area shifted into view and the winding shine of the river.

Night was the best time for the spreading of the G-Agent. Inversion was right. The stuff swept along close to the ground which cooled more slowly than the air. That, too, had been planned. The timing was right. Everything had been worked out right.

But now—what was to happen to her?

She felt none of the probing demands from the direction rocket. She felt not even a hint of them. Perhaps they had gone away forever and she was free. Free! FREE!

They wanted her alive, or her helio with her as part of it, would have been disintegrated long before this. She could understand why. The worst that she could do she had done. There was no need in killing her to prevent more sabotage. They wanted her alive. They wanted to know who she was, what she was, what organization or organizations she represented, if any. They had no idea who she was. Or at least it seemed unlikely yet that they had found out. Perhaps they even thought she was a Martian. Whatever they thought, they didn't know. She realized how desperately they had to know.

The helio dropped straight down toward the deceptive softness of the forest sea. The wind sighed around the helio as the green darkness loomed up, seeming to rush up from all sides, its softness changing suddenly into the harshness of jagged limbs and bulging trunks. She clung to the dead controls as though there were some kind of promise in them, some solidity. But everything dropped from under her, a sickening dislocation, as she clung as though she had no support, as though the earth itself were falling away.

The tearing impact was like a thousand echos of her terrors.

And the forest and the wet shine of harsh wood that tore metal and ripped like flashes of hot light, the blanket of crushing leaves, and the cooling shadows rushed smothering in around her.

Lights fingered through the leaves. She could hear footsteps, stealthy and invisible, flowing among the lights. The lights moved around, streaming in from all directions, like the shifting bars of a tightening cage.

She wasn't dead! When she moved slightly in the twisted shine of metal, a beam of light 

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